Planetarium by Adrienne Rich
(Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848, astronomer,A woman in the shape of a monster
sister of William; and others)
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman "in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles"
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetousness
ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind
An eye, "virile, precise and absolutely certain"
from the mad webs of Uranisborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
"Let me not seem to have lived in vain"
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslateable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
